The Secret Riddle
by Calasse
Summary: AU, pre-slash [HP/TR]: 'The only redeeming quality of the mudblood,' I recall Walburga's shrill, disdainful voice spit, 'is that he earns points for the House, and only that.'


**The Secret Riddle**

**ϟ**

He sits there, his long, slender legs crossed at the knees, his lissome body nestled comfortably in an armchair in front of the fireplace. He is wholly engrossed in his reading, the heavy tome upon his lap held almost reverently by his long-fingered hands. Dark, chocolate curls of hair fall into his eyes as he cranes his neck downward to look better at a passage, wrinkles forming between his shapely brows in concentration. After a few moments, the wrinkles smooth out as delighted insight brightens his grey eyes behind those large, face-dominating spectacles of his, and he leans further over the tome in what I perceive is renewed excitement.

Nonchalantly, and with seemingly no thought or effort at all, he makes a small gesture towards the fireplace with his hand and the embers at the borders of the hearth flare alive. He doesn't use his wand. He doesn't utter a spell. He doesn't even look up from his tome at all.

It is incredible how all these nuances go unnoticed by the other chattering students in our common room. For all the devious intelligence and wit the Slytherin House supposedly holds, the fascinating creature named Tom Riddle, who has held my attention so avidly since the very beginning of our schooling in Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, has lived under the radar of these cunning but prejudiced folk; dismissed for his lack of pureblood origin, his absent riches, the love he has for knowledge outweighing any interest in the power games our peerage so often partake in, deeming him more fit for the house of the ravens than the snakes', his unremarkable appearance—which is not unremarkable at all, I note, transfixed, tracing with my gaze the long, sooty lashes that outline his deep grey eyes, his straight nose, and the supple curve of his lips for what is seemingly the nth time—and his orphaned status.

_The only redeeming quality of the mudblood_, I recall Walburga's shrill, disdainful voice spit, _is that he earns points for the House, and only that._

I nearly laughed then, in pity and in disgust at the bigotry and obtuseness of them all. I have always wondered how the supposed _crème de la crème_ generation of pureblood heirs and heiresses, all assumed to have undergone the tutelage of the best field Masters and Mistresses in branches of magic excluded from Hogwarts' curriculum, in their childhoods and in the summers and winters in between school terms, arguably intelligent except for the instances where prejudice sullies their judgement, could have remained blind to the limitless power that remains restrained under the perfect control of Riddle.

It is an utterly baffling conundrum. Yet at the same time, it is not.

I have observed Tom Riddle throughout the five years we have shared within Hogwarts' walls. From the moment I've seen the other boy step through the barrier separating our world from the muggles' with silent purpose, as if the act itself signified something greater than what it was, I knew to keep my eye on him. For what, I did not know back then, but I have always been one to listen to my instinct.

My eyes followed the other boy as he walked down the platform, betraying the strength of his lithe body as he pulled a large, beaten trunk behind him without, I supposed, a charm to help lighten its bulking weight. Confusion made me arch my eyebrow, for the other boy's delicate, patrician features and his natural grace contrasted sharply with the secondhand robes that he wore.

Spotting no parents or guardians who accompanied him, together with the substandard state of his possessions, I assumed that he was a poor orphan who descended from an unpopular, impoverished pureblood line.

I did not even consider then that he was muggleborn, for despite the poor appearance of his belongings, he himself emanated a presence so distinctly pureblood he cannot be mistaken for anything else.

After a breath and an intense, sweeping glance, he stepped into a shadowed corner of the walkway and looked around his vicinity. I was lucky, I realized later on, that I was far from his vision; for if he saw me watching him then I would not know what I do today.

I watched, amazed as his poised form hunkered down into one of unnoticeable, unassuming anonymity, and as he began to walk, his once confident gait became unsure, his feet shuffling hesitantly on the tiles of the platform. He pulled his hulking trunk with considerably more noise than before, muttering meek apologies to the irritated students and parents that he bumped into with his seeming clumsiness.

It was a strange and perplexing sight, one that had immensely piqued my curiosity and one that I had hoped to investigate. I bid a quick but warm goodbye to my parents, hastily promising to write to cut off Mother's persistent requests, to a disapproving frown from Father. I couldn't care less, for I wanted to chase down the other boy and demand answers from him.

Steam blew from the funnel of the locomotive, obstructing the view of the platform for a few moments. As it cleared, I caught sight of the other boy's back and his lumbering luggage near the caboose. By the time that I escaped from my parents, the boy had already disappeared into the scarlet train. I quickly entered the Express, hoping to catch him before he sequestered himself in a compartment.

By the middle carriage, my friends accosted me and pulled me into their compartment. I tampered down my impatience and irritation as I listened to the inane conversation of our impending Sorting; for all of us already know that we need to be in the esteemed Slytherin House, or at least Ravenclaw, to avoid the sure disapproval and scorn from our own respective families if we were sorted into any other House.

I was tight-lipped about what I had witnessed of the strange boy, and kept my discovery of that day to myself. I didn't want to share what I saw; it was so uniquely peculiar, and something that I felt should be kept secret unless the other boy deemed it otherwise. After all, it was absolutely riveting, if a bit bizarre, and I wanted to know more about the stranger. I wanted to find out if it were merely a trick of my mind, and the confident, purposeful boy who stepped into our world did not exist.

I never imagined that the strange, beautiful male would maintain his act throughout the years, and build upon it, even.

Now, after a lengthy time of constant observation, a well of respect and awe has grown inside me for Tom Riddle's impeccable performance. It is something that far surpassed any of the puerile masks that my fellow purebloods fancied themselves to be masters of, for it is _he_ who is the master of them all. A living, breathing actor, who I think has manipulated the entire school into believing him to be someone who he is not. Someone insignificant and below notice except for his outstanding academic record. Someone competent but not particularly powerful nor accomplished. Someone easily forgettable, with a name so common and a presence moderately self-effacing.

It's simply unbelievable, how he has deceived almost everyone by his pretense. The only reason for my exception is that I was aware of how he is, if only by a glimpse, before he took on his persona and became an entirely different person. I knew that I had to watch him, never mind what to look for, but I knew that the enigma who is Tom Riddle would prove fascinating to observe.

And he did, in every single occasion that I had enough focus to muster in observing him. His eyes are observant and calculating one moment, but with a glint of a stray light from those large glasses engulfing his face, they become shortsighted and lackluster the next. It's disconcerting how he can switch his persona on and off as he likes, but it is a testament to his hidden brilliance.

In the moments when he is so immersed in the dusty, fungus-infested grimoires that he is never seen without, fully forgetting that there is a world outside of the bubble of space created by his intrinsic thirst for knowledge, the workings of his, I suspect, magnificently complex mind, and whatever information the book he holds offers; in these solitary moments, strangely enough, he opens up like he doesn't in any other time.

His face softens; the mask of the dull, uninteresting student slips for a while as he makes himself snug in a quiet alcove, or that single, isolated table in the Arithmancy section of the library, or an armchair in front of the fireplace, as he does now, when no other student occupies the space. The light in his eyes becomes pellucid and vibrant in interest and in learning, his body clearly eager as he loses his composure and bends over his book, though he remains uncannily poised, still; his shapely eyebrows expressive in a way that the almost statuesque quality of his face is not—very unlike how he is in our everyday classes, where he moves through the motions of the attentive student as if everything were tedious and routine, and none of the lessons is even remotely engaging or stimulating to him.

He gets away with these moments of openness because no one bothers to observe him. Because Tom Riddle, the penniless, know-it-all mudblood, isn't worth even an ounce of attention from the high and mighty Slytherin purebloods, and the rest of the school are just plain unobservant. They had no reason to watch him. He made sure of that.

He wasn't completely like that before, however. I remember our first year, when he was continuously adjusting himself. He was a complete stranger to the world that my peers and I were born and raised in, entering without any knowledge of the ways of magic that we so often deem as common sense, taking in everything with excitement and an eagerness that was oddly humbling—though the other purebloods did not think the same—and genuinely alive in our classes in a way that he is not in the succeeding years, though he kept up the pretense of being the interested know-it-all.

Of course, all of these are just speculations that I've conjectured from the rather distant observations that I have of him. Nothing is for certain, except for the fact that he is definitely hiding something. What, I do not know.

Only time would tell.

* * *

**Disclaimer:** I do not own Harry Potter or the cover image of the story.

**Notes:** This is written from the point of view of one Hydrus Black, who takes the place of Harry Potter in this universe. It's a weird voice, with its almost formal prose, but I wanted to experiment with a Harry who was born in the 1920s, who was raised in a pureblood setting, and who has not undergone what Harry in canon had (the murder of his parents, the abuse from the Dursleys, the Prophecy and how it practically dictated his life, and of course, his connection to Voldemort); how the relatively uneventful and comfortable life he has led as a pureblood heir would affect his way of thinking, and the way that he would see a secretive Tom Riddle. He is still Harry, though I guess this one-shot does not exactly show that. When I finally have the time, I might make a story out of this alternate universe (because honestly, this one-shot is more of a case of tell than show) and start from Harry's and Tom's childhoods, though I don't promise anything. Might prove interesting.


End file.
